Sunday, June 29, 2008

This Bizarro cartoon is made possible by Mind-Numbing Confections, Inc.Like anyone, I loved hearing the ice cream truck coming when I was a kid. But now I've got this damned OCD-type mechanism in my brain that hangs onto any melody I hear for hours or days, playing it over and over in my head.

My studio is on the second floor of our apartment, overlooking our street in Brooklyn, and I like to have the windows open when it is between 65 and 85 degrees. For most of the summer, this leaves me totally vulnerable to the local popsicle vendors and their satanic soundtracks.

How a person with any hearing at all can work these trucks is beyond my imagination. I'd rather drive a school bus full of hungry badgers.

I can more than sympathize with your problem of getting a tune trapped in your head. At the age of 40 and after having spent much of my life avidly plugged in to every form of junk culture there is, I find that I have a tremendous shitheap in my head already crowding out the place. And then, when a tune gets trapped in my head, there just isn't room up there for it at all. The tune actually hurts. I now have whole new appreciation for the idea of something grating on one's nerves.

In our old neighborhood there was an ice cream truck that came around after 11:00 p.m. on a regular basis. The general consensus/local joke was that he was dealing drugs out of the back. About a month ago, some friends of ours blogged that that self-same "ice cream man" was busted for *gasp* dealing drugs out of the back of his truck (http://brudisandbrudette.blogspot.com/2008/06/joke-turned-reality.html)

We had one ice cream truck in our neighborhood that played Greensleeves. Never could get them to sell me pot.

I’ve also found that the best way to get an ear worm out is to sing the choral movement to Beethoven's Ninth. Since I don’t speak German that well, I’ve learned it phonetically. Afterwords, my auditory mind is so wiped out, nothing can live.

A woman in my hometown (Santa Rosa, CA) sued to get the ice cream truck to cease playing music in her neighborhood, claiming that it was noise pollution. She won.

We don't have ice cream trucks in my neighborhood, just the Hispanics with the carts and little horn/bell. It's considerably less invasive than the Vietnamese Buddhist Temple next door that goes "bong bong bong" every day, all day.